Essay On De-Industrialization

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India’s de-industrialization took place in the middle/end of the XIX century. Fifty years before, in the beginning of the XIX century, Great Britain decided to leave agriculture and to dedicate itself to industrialization. While in the beginning of the XIX century still 70% of the population was rural, in 1840 only 25% were still farmers. At the end of the XIX century instead, rural population nearly not existed any more in Great Britain. The global importation of food indeed, forced farmers to give up on their production and they decided to start working in industries in the big cities. In exactly the same period, in India took place a global de-industrialization. While India has still shown a big export surplus in the beginning of the XIX century, only few decades later, its industry was completely destroyed. As a result, at the end of the XIX century India imported from Great Britain three-quarters of the textile products. One way to concretely explain what de-industrialization is and how it works, is by analyzing India’s situation and transformation over the centuries. Between the XVII and XVIII centuries, India was considered as a global manufacturer powerhouse, an authentic “industrial workshop” of the world. Its economy was characterized by a blending of agriculture and handicrafts.…show more content…
D.R. Gadgil, a famous Indian economist, attributed the de-industrialization not only to the decline of the cotton industry, but also to other causes, including the fact that from the sixties of the XIX century to the XX century India has gone through various droughts and dryness. The aforementioned problem, added to a period of bad harvest, created the conditions for the worst agriculture in the whole colonial era. Moreover, data shows that population growth did not exceed 0.4% and wages declined steadily, creating some serious economic issues for

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